New Special Abilities

[Poryhedron]

I have a few questions about the plethora of new Special Abilities introduced in Diamond and Pearl; perhaps someone who's played the Japanese version can answer them.

According to Serebii, the ability "Electric Engine" causes the pokémon's Speed to increase when it is hit with an Electric attack. Is the Speedup instead of, or in addition to, the dealing of damage?

The ability "Filter", possessed by Mr. Mime, apparently causes super-effective attacks to deal half damage. In other words, no attack is super-effective. What about the abilities "Hard Rock" and "Heat Proof"? The former 'lowers the damage' from super-effective attacks; the latter 'lowers the damage' from Fire attacks (and is possessed by a pokémon that would be weak against Fire.) Just how much do these two abilities lower damage? Possibly half, like Filter?

[ssj4supernerd]

About Electric Engine, I do think you would still take damage. Otherwise, Speed Monsters could be created.(Think Starmie who got a Skill Swap. Biggest weakness away and constantly getting Speed)


About Hard Rock and Heat Proof, maybe we should see like Thick Fat for example.

[Poryhedron]

Thick Fat halves damage from Fire and Ice, which would mean my guess is correct. ...unless Filter actually halves damage instead of letting it double due to type relations...nah, that just couldn't be.

[mr_pikachu]

I see four different ways that Filter could work.


1. If a move is super-effective, the resulting damage is halved. A 2x damage move is treated as a 1x damage move, and a 4x damage move is treated as a 2x damage move.

2. Super-effective moves are treated as normal moves. Damage dealt is 1x the normal rate.

3. Super-effective moves are treated as ineffective moves. Damage dealt is 0.5x the normal rate.

4. The Pokemon types that make a move super-effective are negated. For instance, if Magcargo (Fire/Rock) was hit with a Grass attack, Rock's weakness to Grass would be ignored. The attack would deal 0.5x the normal damage because Fire Pokemon are resistant to Rock moves. If Magcargo was instead hit wit a Water attack, the attack would deal 1x the normal damage because both weaknesses to Water moves would be ignored.


Obviously these get less and less likely as you go through the list. But they're worth mentioning nonetheless, if only to inspire theoretical discussion.

[Negrek]

All information courtesy of Smogon's testing staff:

Electric Engine: exactly like volt absorb, but increases speed instead of health. Negates damage and any additional effects of attacks (i.e. it is triggered by thunder wave, but no paralysis condition is given) and raises speed one level.

Filter: negates supereffectivity (that is, all supereffective attacks are treated as though they were just normally effective).

Hard Rock: reduces the effectiveness of supereffective attacks. Supereffective attacks (i.e. ground-type) do 1.33x damage instead of 2x. Double-supereffective attacks (water, grass) do 2.67x damage instead of 4x.

Heat Proof: cuts damage dealt by fire-type attacks in half.

[Lady Vulpix]

Cool, testers! Time to revive my old questions.

Ability: Quick Feet
Effect: if this pokemon is burnt, paralyzed or poisoned, its speed increases 1 grade. Is the speed decrease that comes with paralysis ignored or not?

Ability: Skill Link
Effect: Raises number of hits when using moves that hit multiple times. How much? Please test and reply.

Ability: Slow Start
Effect: This Pokemon's attack and speed are halved for the first few turns. How many turns?

Ability: Solar Power
Effect: When Sunny Day is in effect, HP decreases 1/8 each turn but Special Attack increases 1 grade. Is this correct? Please confirm.

Ability: Bad Luck
Effect: Opponents have a higher chance of performing a Critical Hit on this pokemon. How much higher?

Ability: Poison Heal
Effect: Please test this in the games and let us know how it works. Each guide says something different.

Ability: Super Luck
Effect: This pokemon has a higher chance of performing a Critical Hit. How much higher?

Thanks in advance.

[Negrek]

Quick feet: multiplies speed 1.5x if paralyzed; no speed drop is caused by the condition. The pokémon may still become "fully paralyzed" 25% of the time, however.

Skill link: fails to raise power of multi-strike attacks, but instead guarantees that they will strike the full five times.

Slow start: five turns.

Solar power: power increase brought up for clarification, but never definitively defined that I can see.

Bad luck: a mistranslation of super or strong luck. This trait does not exist.

Poison Heal: when the user is poisoned, whether by toxic or normal poisoning, they regain 1/8th of their HP per turn (twice leftovers recovery). They are also immune to all other status conditions because they are technically poisoned.

Strong luck: unspecified; I would expect the increase to be equal to that of the increase from scope lens. It stacks with scope lens and high crit ratio moves.

[mr_pikachu]

Slow start: five turns

...Are you saying that the Pokemon sits around for five turns before it can attack? That's a little odd. I'm guessing it's something for Slaking or similarly lazy tanks.

And Skill Link... sucks. I'm not sure how it would be of any use, as it would make moves like Rollout totally useless.

In contrast, Quick Feet and Poison Heal could be cool, although the former's a little risky if you try to use it.

[Jeff]

So for poison heal, is the healing instead of poison damage or in addition to it? I'm assuming poison damage itself does not apply.

As for Strong luck, that's what I'm thinking. Makes Honchcrow look pretty interesting.

Edit: @Mr.Pika: Slow start only halves Attack and Speed for the first 5 turns, only Regigigas has it.

[Poryhedron]

Slow start: five turns

...Are you saying that the Pokemon sits around for five turns before it can attack? That's a little odd. I'm guessing it's something for Slaking or similarly lazy tanks.

Erm, no. It does not sit around for five turns. It just has reduced ATK and SPD for the first five turns.

And Skill Link... sucks. I'm not sure how it would be of any use, as it would make moves like Rollout totally useless.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. At all. Take another look at the ability description, please. This ability guarantees that every time you use a move like Fury Attack, Icicle Spear, or Bullet Seed, it will score the full five hits.

[mr_pikachu]

Oh. I assumed that "fails to raise power of multi-strike attacks" was a reference to moves of increasing power, such as Rollout, Ice Ball, and perhaps Fury Cutter.

...Why does it say that, anyway? I can't think of any moves like the ones you mentioned which increase in power with successive hits.

Incidentally, I'm now seeing that Negrek's post was in response to Gabi's, not a list of newly revealed abilities. Pink font + lack of sleep = stupidity.

[Negrek]

Recovery from poison heal is instead of poison damage, yes.

...Why does it say that, anyway? I can't think of any moves like the ones you mentioned which increase in power with successive hits.

I thought the question was how much skill link increased damage for multi-strike moves; the answer, then, is that there is no power increase.

[Phoenixsong]

Although the Quick Feet question has already been answered, I'd like to point out that I don't see any reason for paralysis to decrease speed; burning doesn't decrease the attack of a Pokémon with Guts. Anyway.

I've a question or two of my own. For the "Frisk" ability (I believe it was originally Danger Anticipate... I dunno), how do you "see" what item your foe is holding? Does a text message pop up saying, "Foe PIKACHU is holding a LIGHT BALL!"? Does a little sprite of the item appear by the Pokémon? I've been curious as to how that ability works for some time now. Similarly, how does Forewarn work? Does it list the attacks after the foe is released?

How much sooner do Pokémon with Gluttony use their held berries?

What happens when you use Sand-Attack, Double Team, etc. in a battle with a Machop/choke/champ that has No Guard?

What does "Simple" mean, effects from attacks and abilities are increased? If a Bibarel uses, say, Ancientpower (whether or not it really can) and gets the stat increase, do all of its stats go up by two instead of one? Or does Ancientpower have a higher percent chance of causing the stat gain?

Sniper increases the base value of an attack during a critical hit by how much, now? Does it depend on the attack itself?

Do high speed priority moves affect Stall? Does that ability, like, ruin Sableye's Fake Out? I would assume no, but still.

As far as Technician is concerned, what defines a "weaker" move and how much does its power increase? Does it vary based on the attack?

Um, yeah. Sorta curious, mostly because I'm working on a bit of a projectish and I need to know...

[Negrek]

Far sight is believed to give the name of the item that the opponent is holding. It displays a text message, anyway; the person who tested this one apparently can't read Japanese, but all indicators seem to be that it's just a little thingy like, "Stantler detected an ENIGMA BERRY with its far sight!" No message is given if the foe is not holding an item, and this trait only triggers once, when the pokémon using it is sent into battle. If a foe holding something then later switches in on it, the new item is not detected.

Forewarn will only tell you what move the opponent has with the highest base power. If two of the opponent's moves have the same BP, the one you're informed of is selected at random. This ability appears to operate solely based upon BP and does not take into effect things like STAB, for example (thus, if raichu had volt tackle and focus punch, you would be alerted of focus punch even though its volt tackle would ordinarily be more powerful).

Nobody knows how gluttony works.

No guard makes all moves guaranteed hit, as revealed by this little anecdote from Tox:

I did some initial testing on No Guard and can confirm that its 100% accuracy does indeed apply to OHKO moves as well. Sheer Cold broke my +6 evasion Machamp's Substitutes every time Machamp was targetted. I also Skill Swapped No Guard onto a few OHKO users, and...well...enjoy your AR'd Sheer Cold Machamps.

edit: When I had Walrein and Machamp out in a dual battle, Walrein's Sheer Cold would behave normally (IE: miss most of the time) when targetting anything other than a pokemon with No Guard.

Evasion has no effect upon it, nor do accuracy reductions, apparently. Machamp will also hit pokémon "in the air" while flying. It has not been conclusively tested, but it is believed to work through dive and dig as well. And as you can see, no guard means that the opponent's attacks are also guaranteed to hit.

Simple doubles the effect of non status-based stat changers, positive or negative, applied to Bidoof or whatever has it. Ancientpower would therefore double all its stats (+2 stat boost), and it would have its attack halved by intimidate (-2 stat reduction). Baton-passed stat effects are doubled as well.

Sniper doubles the damage from critical hits, meaning that 4x the damage, ignoring foe stat boosts, is dealt, rather than the usual 2x.

Sableye's stall makes it always go last within the priority bracket for the move it's using. So if it uses fake out, it will still move before something using solarbeam. If it uses focus punch against something that is also using focus punch, then that other thing will always FP first.

Technician multiplies the base power of all normally BP 60 or less (inclusive) attacks by 1.5. So a scyther with technician using silver wind would count that silver wind as having 90 base power instead of 60, 135 with STAB.

If you're going to need this sort of information and stuff a lot, I can PM you the link to the thread I'm referencing; don't believe I can post it here due to advertising restrictions.

[Jeff]

You can post the link here. As long as it's directly to the information asked for (the thread in this case). You're just not allowed to link to a site just to advertise it.

[Negrek]

Fair enough, then. http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14156

[ssj4supernerd]

Miltank has a new ability, "Scrappy". It allows it to hit Ghosts with Normal & Fighting attacks. Is it normal damage, or super effective or so?

[Knight of Time]

One new ability that really has me curious, to how it works, is Download.

When a Pokemon using this ability enters a battle, how much does its Attack/Special Attack increase? I wish I knew more about this confusing ability.

[Poryhedron]

Miltank has a new ability, "Scrappy". It allows it to hit Ghosts with Normal & Fighting attacks. Is it normal damage, or super effective or so?

I would assume it works the same way Foresight and Odor Slueth do: the target's Ghost-type immunity is simply ignored. This means, for example, that a Fighting-type attack will deal half damage to a Haunter but double damage to a Sableye.

[Negrek]

One new ability that really has me curious, to how it works, is Download.

When a Pokemon using this ability enters a battle, how much does its Attack/Special Attack increase? I wish I knew more about this confusing ability.

It is multiplied by 1.5x. This does not count as an official stat boost, so it stacks with things like swords dance (you could legally get a 1.5x attack boost and +6 attack levels from swords dance simultaneously).

[Crazy Elf Boy]

Yeh I was also wondering is the slow start ability is the attack and speed counted as a stat cut or does it start the battle with it automatically.

eg Stat Cut: *Throws Pokeball* Outcomes Regigigas, *Shows the stat cut scene* Regigigas's Attack and Speed fell becuase of Slow Start.

Cause if it was a stat cut couldn't you just "White Herb" it?

[Negrek]

It's not a stat cut. It's like choice band or adherance scarf: it modifies stats without modifying "stat levels." So no, it can't be white herbed.

[Lady Vulpix]

Thanks a lot, Negrek. You'll be credited on the AC/CC traits list.